1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates to multilingual automatic indicia output, and more particularly to a multilingual automatic output system and method using identifiers of language-specific entities capable of automatically outputting indicia of multiple languages.
2. Description of the Related Art
By convention, an apparatus, such as a printer, a multifunctional peripheral (MFP), a copier, a facsimile, and a scanner, capable of outputting image data to an output medium, such as a display device or printing paper, is referred to as an image forming apparatus. Performance enhancements to the image forming apparatus now allows such a device to output image data directly to a network, e.g., to transfer an e-mail message without a personal computer (PC).
Such an image forming apparatus can not only receive the address and contents of an e-mail from a user using a graphical user interface (GUI), but, when provided with a communications adapter, such as a network card, can also send a scanned document, a received facsimile, and an e-mail prepared by the user without a PC.
In certain cases, the image forming apparatus is provided with functionality to pre-store e-mail addresses that are frequently used and to concurrently send a particular e-mail message to members of a group of people.
In the conventional case of sending an e-mail using an image forming apparatus, a user or sender selects a function to send an e-mail message, and then a window to enter the message and indicia representing keys to form a graphical keyboard are displayed on a screen. Subsequently, the user enters the recipient's address and the contents of the e-mail message that is to be sent in the appropriate portions of the send window, and sends the prepared e-mail.
However, in the conventional case, when the sender wants to change the keyboard language, that is, when the user wants to send the e-mail in the language of the intended recipient, the sender must first reconfigure the graphical keyboard by selecting the desired language from a language choice menu, and only then can prepare the e-mail message, which, at a minimum, is inconvenient for the sender.
In other words, when the sender wants to send the e-mail in the desired language, the sender is inconvenienced in that he/she must manually select the languages one by one.